Pharmaceuticals Should “Develop an Agile Culture” to Keep Competitive

Online staff assessments can reveal missing skills across the workforce

TRUMBULL, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pharmaceutical companies must seek new skills and foster a more agile culture to maintain a competitive edge.

In a new white paper, Questionmark, the online assessment provider, explores how its customers across the industry are using staff assessments to identify missing skills and barriers to cultural change.

The white paper identifies six people-related challenges:

1. Increased pace of change – new regulations mean a greater number of more specialist products are coming to market more quickly.

2. The need for a shift in culture – employers are looking to recruit people from outside the industry to shake-up working culture

3. Shortage of technical skills – before hiring, employers are struggling to ensure that new recruits have the skills and aptitude needed. Eighty-five percent of job applicants admit to lying on their resume or CV.¹

4. Staff retention - some studies estimate that replacing an employee can cost 2.5 times their salary.²

5. Ineffective training – learning and development teams fear they do not have the resources to meet the scale of the upskilling challenge.

6. Complying with complex regulations - in 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued more warning letters to makers of finished medicinal products than ever before.³

Lars Pedersen, CEO at Questionmark said: “Employers across pharmaceuticals recognize the need to upskill. They know that culture needs a shakeup. But are they clear on exactly what skills are missing? What are the attitudes that are preventing cultural change?

“Assessing workers reveals where strengths and weaknesses lie. It shows whether training programs are effectively developing the necessary skills. By testing new recruits before hiring them, employers can ensure that new starters have the skills to hit the ground running and the aptitude to thrive.”

Assessing and testing the workforce can give employers the information they need to make better people-decisions. Assessments shine a light on the current state of play and show what is missing across teams and business functions. Changes can be made. Training can be improved. New skills can be sought in the recruitment process. Continual assessment can confirm that these strategies are working.

Read the white paper ‘The pharmaceutical workforce: creating change and keeping competitive’.

https://www.questionmark.com/sectors-and-uses/pharmaceuticals/

The white paper forms part of the ‘Questionmark Viewpoint’ series which explores the challenges that Questionmark customers face, and how Questionmark helps address them.

About Questionmark

Questionmark provides a secure enterprise-grade assessment platform and professional services to leading organizations around the world, delivered with care and unequalled expertise. Its full-service online assessment tool and professional services help customers to improve their performance and meet their compliance requirements. Questionmark enables organizations to unlock their potential by delivering assessments which are valid, reliable, fair and defensible.

Questionmark offers secure powerful integration with other LMS, LRS and proctoring services making it easy to bring everything together in one place. Questionmark's cloud-based assessment management platform offers rapid deployment, scalability for high-volume test delivery, 24/7 support, and the peace-of-mind of secure, audited U.S., Australian and European-based data centers.

¹ https://www.inc.com/jt-odonnell/staggering-85-of-job-applicants-lying-on-resumes-.html

² http://ijepr.org/panels/admin/papers/ij4%20(1).pdf

³ https://www.thefdagroup.com/blog/2019-fda-warning-letter-inspection-observation-trends